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Comment by icebraining | Hacker News Reader

The article explains it plainly: they weren't getting the message to business people that Gmail on Google Apps isn't scanned despite free Gmail being, so they stopped scanning Gmail altogether.

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Didn't they also get caught a couple of times scanning the email despite saying they weren't? I know there was a lawsuit alleging that they scanned the email of many university students after saying they wouldn't [0], which I think was settled for high 3 or low 4 figures per person, although I'm not sure (and wasn't a participant).

[0] http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2016/3/23/alumni-lawsuit-a...

stopped scanning Gmail altogether.

Note that this is not what the article says. It says that they stopped scanning Gmail for ads, but does not say they stopped scanning email for non-ad purposes.

Any spam filtering implies scanning right? (Unless the filtering is purely on basis of headers and other non-message-body info)

It depends on whether you consider mail headers part of the email. I personally think scanning mail headers still counts as scanning email.

Well yeah. They have to scan content for you to effectively search your own email, which is one of their flagship features.

I can't edit the above, but the context I meant was non-ad, non-email purposes.

To be more accurate the article says they stopped scanning for ads that appear inside gmail. Whether they still scan emails in the free gmail for use outside gmail is unknown, but I may be being pedantic...

(disclosure, I work on gmail, although nothing related to ads)

I can't find a citation, but I'm fairly confident that that's never been the case. Ad targeting from emails has always been siloed to within gmail. To quote the post:

>Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change.

That's pretty unequivocal.

Thanks!

I agree - I read the article. But having many sources to feed the ads probably made the decision to announce universally that emails are no longer going to be scanned easier to do in the first place.

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